The 2002 live version appears on an upcoming reissue of the Truckers’ 2003 album Decoration Day
It was four days after Father’s Day. Midway through the Drive-By Truckers‘ informal late-night acoustic show in their hometown of Athens, Georgia, their 23 year-old guitarist and budding songwriter named Jason Isbell decided to premiere a song he’d just written as a Father’s Day gift for his dad.
That song was called Outfit,” and the performance that followed that night at the Flicker Bar — the first time, as far as the band can remember, that Isbell ever performed the song — would end up becoming a piece of Drive-By Truckers’ history. The performance, and the entire show at the Flicker Bar, will be released as part of the Drive-By Truckers’ forthcoming reissue of Decoration Day. Today, Rolling Stone is premiering both the live acoustic performance of “Outfit” and the remastered studio version.
The live “Outfit” is a revelation: You can hear the audience react in real time to the first few lines, cheering along as Isbell sets the scene of a young couple conceiving a child in the back seat of a Mustang in the first verse. In the second verse, you can hear Isbell still tinkering with the verse melody. By the time he’s singing about “a bucket of wealthy man’s paint,” the crowd roars back in affirmation.
“The perspective of that song is maybe not as earnest as a lot of people take it to be,” Isbell told the writer Stephen Deusner for the reissue’s liner notes. “I’m not trying to tell everyone how they should raise their children. I’ve written a lot of advice songs, because that is a very southern tradition to me. But not all that advice is good advice, because I’m trying to create characters and paint a picture of people. Looking back, the arrangement’s so bizarre. It loops back in on itself in a really weird way. But I was trying to write a very particular kind of song for FAME to pitch to country singers, and I wanted to do the exact opposite of that with the Truckers. I was like, Let’s just make a mess. Let’s just roll around in it and let the song go wherever it wants to go.”
The Definitive Decoration Day will be released Nov. 14 via New West Records as a four-LP box set featuring the remixed and remastered original album, along with Heathens Live at Flicker Bar, Athens, GA – June 20, 2022. There’s also a 40-page book featuring photos and Deusner’s new essay.
